[ppml] Policy to help the little guys

David Williamson <dlw+arin at tellme.com> writes:
> To be clear, any proposal that I'm likely to support would require the
> recipient of a PI /24 to be multihomed.  Heck, I'd be happy if there
> was no non-multihomed PI available.  I don't quite get why large
> singlehomed PI space is permitted under the current policy.  If you
> don't need to be multihomed, get space from an ISP.

>From a end-user or ISP perspective, assuming you have the technical 
resources on hand to deal with it, having your own IP 
space is advantageous even when you are single-homed because it 
makes changing transit providers much easier.  

IP addresses, if they are owned by your provider, function to a greater 
or lesser degree as 'lock-in' -  if renumbering is expensive (and depending 
on what sort of services you sell (and if you or your customers control
the dns)  it can go from trivial to crushingly expensive)  

The idea is that a profit-seeking service provider, if they know it is 
expensive for you to move, is likely to increase the price (or decrease
service, etc..)  until they are just under the industry standard cost plus 
the cost of renumbering.  

I'm not arguing that you should hand out PI space to smaller operators
at the expense of larger operators (who then need to maintain larger routers.)
Clearly there is a balance that needs to be struck and I'm not claiming to 
know where that balance should be.

I am just trying to explain why the smaller operators strongly prefer PI 
space rather than addresses tied to the transit they buy.